Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Harry Potter Turns 20

Grappling with ‘Harry Potter’ on the series’ 20th anniversary

A collection of “Harry Potter” books. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)Pop culture anniversaries are thick on the ground these days, but one we marked this week stands out. “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”
was published 20 years ago, which means that an entire generation has
come of age with J.K. Rowling’s seven-part “Harry Potter” series, the
movie adaptations, a play and various Web iterations as one of their
dominant cultural experiences. And since that generation also grew up at
a time when television production was ramping up and the Internet was
making previously inaccessible culture easier to access, “Harry Potter”
plays a particularly outsize role as a generational touchstone.

I’ve
read Rowling’s novels repeatedly since their release, including in a
marathon rereading of all seven novels over one long winter weekend
several years ago. There are a lot of things I appreciate about the
books, among them Rowling’s Dickensian tendency toward names that
express an emotional onomatopoeia, her mastery of boarding-school
dynamics and the character arcs of Hermione Granger, Neville Longbottom
and the collective Weasleys. As a critic, the thing I respect most about
Rowling’s work is the way her prose and ideas mature as Harry Potter’s
mind does: Harry’s walk into the woods to face his inevitable death in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” makes me weep every time I read that passage, no matter how familiar I am with the outcome.

But
my experience of “Harry Potter” is no longer the purely private thing
it was when I was 12, or even when I was 21 and picked up my pre-ordered
copy of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” at Kramerbooks in Dupont
Circle and stayed up all night to read it in one sitting. Cultural
consumption is increasingly a public process, and now that I’m a
professional critic, it’s my job. The act of caring about the books,
poring over them and finding meaning in them has become an indicator of a
certain set of ideas. And as much as I love “Harry Potter,” and as much
as I look forward to sharing Rowling’s novels with another generation
of readers, I do feel ambivalent about the way the series has been
turned into a political touchstone.

I
recognize that this use of the novels is probably inevitable: In an
increasingly fragmented media environment, “Harry Potter” is the
increasingly rare cultural language that we can assume everyone will
speak. And unlike, say, the unfolding Marvel Cinematic Universe, which
use political issues as a gloss, Rowling’s books are genuinely concerned
with political and civic concerns: How do you safeguard the integrity
of your institutions? What role does the press play in shaping public
opinion? What is the balance between informing citizens about threats to
national security and panicking them unnecessarily? How should highly
educated people treat the workers who make their lives comfortable? What
obligations do people with special abilities have to those without
them?

These
important questions are both integral to the plot of “Harry Potter” and
relevant to all of us even when we don’t understand ourselves and our
values to be under existential threat. Fans of the franchise have successfully pushed
to make sure that products associated with it live up to Rowling’s
stated values. And developments in America, including attempts to
discredit serious journalism, the degradation of our institutions and
the return of ugly, racist rhetoric to the public sphere, certainly make
some of those concerns feel more sharply urgent.

But even as a
progressive “Harry Potter” fan, I’ve felt a certain queasiness over the
political revisions and uses of the series in recent years.

My
objection isn’t that the series is childish, which is an argument
Rowling herself anticipated: As Albus Dumbledore tells Harry, “Of
house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence,
Voldemort knows and understands nothing. … That they all have a power
beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic is a truth he has
never grasped.” Instead, it’s that “Harry Potter” is an imperfect
metaphor for our given moment. And trying to make it a mere instrument
of politics has a way of reducing its power as literature.

The
process of turning “Harry Potter” into a political instrument is one
that Rowling herself has played a hand in. Among the many world-building
tidbits she has revealed since “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”
was published, Rowling has said that she thought of Dumbledore as gay and that the brainy Hermione Granger could very well be black.
These insights are often greeted as proof of the series’ liberal
values, though I’ve always found them a bit more depressing than
enlightening. Saying these things after the fact, rather than making
them part of the text of her novels, is a way for Rowling to accrue
credit for choices she didn’t actually have the courage to make a part
of her story.

More specifically, the use of “Harry Potter” as a
metaphor for the Trump administration in the United States seems to
spring from the same impulse that branded a resurgence of civic
engagement “the Resistance.” As I’ve written before,
I’m not particularly partial to that formulation, which treats normal
acts, such as calling your representatives, marching in protest or
donating to candidates or causes, as somehow radical. Treating Donald
Trump’s democratic election as if it’s the equivalent of Voldemort’s
covert seizure of power indulges the same urge to portray the people who
oppose the administration as glamorously embattled, a wise chosen few
who can see more clearly than others and are taking the necessary steps
under extreme threat. It’s radical chic that, by defining normal acts as
radicalism, shrinks the sphere of routine civic engagement.

Maybe
I’m being a little sour. But beyond the aptness of this particular
literary metaphor to this specific set of political circumstances,
there’s something grating about our present tendency to take “Harry
Potter,” and many other works of fiction, and contort them to match our
present circumstances as precisely as possible. I believe that art is
political but that its greatest political power comes not in the moments
when it’s subordinated to an existing movement, candidate or agenda,
but when it flies above the moment and helps us see things from a
different perspective.

The
relevant questions we can draw from “Harry Potter” in this moment
aren’t whether Trump has horcruxes hidden in his hotels or whether
British Prime Minister Theresa May is Dolores Umbridge.

Instead, we
should ask how brave we really are, how much we’re doing to support the
people who are with us in the struggle, what value we place on a free
and independent press, and whether we’re sacrificing the most vulnerable
to protect ourselves. Great literature helps us see ourselves and the
world more clearly, rather than bathing us and it in a romantic,
obfuscatory glow. The best respect we can show for “Harry Potter” on the
series’ 20th anniversary is to let the novels transcend the times,
rather than shackling them to the present.

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About Me

This is a blog about what interests me. Here you will find stories on animals, including animal rights material, cute stuff, and random informative posts about weird, beautiful and interesting creatures. Horses, Spotted Hyenas, and Border Collies will make regular appearances.
Also prominently featured will be posts about the Arts. Animation, photography, and the traditional forms, plus "outsider art," film and books.
Other things that will surface here are Japan & the Japanese, John Oliver, surfing, skateboarding and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, interesting places and structures,and my own art, writing and photography.
There will be rants. It's an election year, and I am beginning to have a political dimension to my personality. I am also horrified at the level of injustice and violence visited upon people here in the US and elsewhere - particularly against people of color, immigrants, and the LGBT community. Some of these stories will be very hard to read, but I believe we must read them to keep ourselves mindful of the racist and vicious things that happen every day, to speak out when we see discrimination, and root out its evil from ourselves.